Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine's recent attacks on data centers of Russian tech giant Yandex have lowered the number of Internet bots promoting pro-Kremlin hate, a claim that has been disputed by many technology researchers.
In recent days Ukraine has struck three data centers belonging to Yandex, often called "Russia's Google," causing significant disruptions to many of the company's services, including ride-sharing, payments, food-ordering, cloud computing and chat-bots.
The latest attack hit a Yandex facility in Vladimir, around 180 kilometers east of the capital Moscow, on October 11, forcing a complete suspension of operations.
Two other drone strikes hit Yandex data centers earlier in the week: one on October 8 in the town of Sasovo, about 315 kilometers southeast of Moscow, and another the following day in the Kaluga region, southwest of the capital.
Speaking at the opening day of the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, Zelenskyy said that after Ukraine's attacks on the data centers "it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms."
"There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots -- and it's pretty clear where those bots were coming from," the Ukrainian president said.
The Ukrainian strikes on the data centers appear to have coincided with a collapse in automated traffic from Yandex’s network to roughly 0.4 percent of its recent peak, according to data from Cloudflare Radar, a public tool that tracks global Internet activity.
Russian Social Media Bots
After the drone strikes, particularly the latest one on the Vladimir facility, widespread claims on social media that the attacks had sharply reduced the number of pro-Kremlin bots on social media posting in support of Germany’s far-right AfD party, the right-wing populist Reform UK party, and US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Some users suggested the disruption could affect the US midterm elections in November.
Posting a chart on X, Tomas Zdechovsky, a Czech politician and member of the European Parliament, said that "if confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centers get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets. "
However, many tech experts and researchers have cautioned that the suggested effects on social-media bots appear to have been misread, are based largely on anecdotal evidence, and deserve further scrutiny.
The sharp drop in Yandex’s “bot traffic,” tech researchers say, comes in fact mostly from Yandex’s own web crawlers -- automated programs that scan public websites to index them for search -- rather than from accounts that post disinformation on X and other social networks.
Speaking to RFE/RL, a researcher that operates the X account @antibot4navalny, which tracks government-backed online propaganda efforts and troll networks, said that the Cloudflare chart "has little to do with malicious propaganda bots on social media. It measures automated requests to websites (of any kind, among which social media share is negligible)."
XenoSpectrum, a Japanese website covering technology and science, wrote that "What Cloudflare Radar showed falling sharply was HTTP requests from AS13238, a network operated by Yandex, that were estimated to be automated traffic...This data therefore shows neither the volume of Internet traffic across Russia nor the number of messages posted on any particular social network."
More data is likely to emerge in the coming weeks that will shed more light on the impact of the drone strikes on pro-Kremlin social media accounts.
Zelenskyy has said that the strikes were a "tit-for-tat" response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, which intensified in September and have affected Internet and mobile services across Ukraine. The attacks on Russian data centers mark an expansion of Ukraine’s drone campaign, which has previously targeted Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure.
As of October 12, Yandex continued to report service disruptions while working to restore capacity. Russia’s defense and digital development ministries are discussing measures to protect data centers from drone attacks, state news agency TASS reported on October 12, citing Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev.
Service interruptions to Yandex Go, which is the tech giant's main mobile app for ride-hailing, delivery, and other urban services and is widely used outside Russia, were also reported in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
"Friends, some of our services are currently experiencing technical issues, which may temporarily disrupt their operation. We are aware of this situation. Our specialists are doing their best to restore the services as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience," Yandex Go, its taxi and delivery services in Kazakhstan, said on October 11.
Service resumed on October 12, though the company said it is continuing work to stabilize performance.
